Inequalitieshttps://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com
Research and reflection from both sides of the Atlantic
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Would more people support foreign aid & charities if they grasped the scale of global inequality?https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/would-more-people-support-foreign-aid-charities-if-they-grasped-the-scale-of-global-inequality/
https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/would-more-people-support-foreign-aid-charities-if-they-grasped-the-scale-of-global-inequality/#commentsTue, 25 Sep 2018 09:15:32 +0000http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/?p=4400Continue reading →]]>This is a guest post by the excellent Aveek Bhattacharya, who (like I did!) combines a PhD in Social Policy in LSE with work in the field of alcohol & public health – and is also cross-posted on his personal blog here.

For all the attention that economic inequality has received in recent years, it is too rarely noticed that the largest disparities in living conditions are between people in rich countries and those who are poor by global standards. Yet for those of us concerned about global inequality, the political trends of the past few years in rich countries have been dispiriting. Foreign aid remains politically controversial, hostility to migration appears to have risen, and trade protectionism seems likely to increase.

In a recent article in The Journal of Politics, Gautam Nair suggests one reason for this apparent lack of concern for the global poor is that people in rich countries do not appreciate just how well off they are by global standards. If we can correct these misperceptions, he suggests, support for international redistribution will grow.

The study

Nair offers compelling evidence that people in the US (and in all likelihood those in other rich countries) massively underestimate global inequality. He surveyed 1,559 Americans, and asked them to estimate the global median income. 74% estimated it to be over $10,000 a year, and 50% over $20,000. In actual fact, it is $2,100 (adjusting for differences in living costs between countries). The average respondent placed themselves barely in the top 40% of the global income distribution. In reality, the majority were in the top 10%. (If you want to discover how your income compares to the rest of the world, this tool will give you an idea).

Nair then explored the effect of informing people about their relative affluence. A third of participants received a message like the one below:

This group was then compared against a ‘salience group’ that was asked to estimate their income relative to others, but did not have their errors corrected; and a control group who were not asked or informed about global inequality.

Those people that were told how rich they were by global standards were then more likely to support increasing foreign aid. The proportion in favour of spending more on aid rose from 12% in the control group to 22% in the information group – around the same difference in attitudes as between Republicans and Democrats. They were also more likely to favour reducing agricultural tariffs.

In a neat piece of study design, Nair also tested whether people are willing to put real money where their mouth is, and actually follow through on these pro-global poor attitudes. He told survey participants that 10% of them would be given $20, and asked them if they were chosen, how they would like to split this between themselves, charities working in the US, and charities working in poor countries. Donations to poor countries rose from 10% in the control group to 16% among those that had just learned about their relative affluence.

Lessons from Nair’s study

Nair’s study seems to offer good news to those of us that believe rich countries should do more to help the global poor. Its implication is that we can achieve a meaningful shift in public opinion in our favour, merely by ensuring more people are aware of their place in the global income distribution. You can imagine how such a campaign might work: starting from word of mouth conversations, up through social media memes, all the way through to the framing of discussions in mass media. This is far from straightforward, but it’s easier than the slower and more painstaking process of trying to change people’s underlying moral beliefs.

We ought to be cautious, though. To begin with, there is a question mark over how sustained these effects are. Nair asks his participants for their views on foreign aid, trade, charity etc almost immediately after informing them about their relative affluence. Yet as time wears on, they may well start to forget what he has told them, and their political views may start to drift back, too. Or they might remember, but the facts might become less salient when they consider their political views. Then again, a mass information campaign of the type I have sketched above might try to shift the framing of these political issues so fundamentally that people’s relative affluence in global terms is regularly at the front of their minds. Indeed, it could be that reinforcement of these facts (rather than just presenting them once, as Nair does) might lead to stronger pro-poor attitudes.

Then again, reinforcement could lead to fatigue, indifference or even resistance. I wonder if the novelty of the facts Nair presented to his participants contributed to the effect they had on their attitudes. Most people in rich countries aren’t used to being told that they are extremely well-off by global standards. Yet if they were continually reminded of that fact, they might grow resentful. I am reminded of the working class Louisiana Tea Party supporter interviewed by Arlie Hochschild, and his objections to liberals’ “PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for”.

Nair’s study offers grounds for optimism that Western electorates can be moved in a direction more sympathetic to the global poor by being reminded of their relative advantage. I can’t help but worry, though, that they will find a way to shrug this off, as they have so many other inconvenient facts.

]]>https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/would-more-people-support-foreign-aid-charities-if-they-grasped-the-scale-of-global-inequality/feed/2inequalitiesguestbloggerDoes the new poverty measure fully capture disability poverty?https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/does-the-new-poverty-measure-fully-capture-disability-poverty/
https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/does-the-new-poverty-measure-fully-capture-disability-poverty/#commentsTue, 18 Sep 2018 15:46:35 +0000http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/?p=4395Continue reading →]]>In recent years, we have seen fierce political battles over what poverty is, and the best way of measuring it. The Social Metrics Commission (SMC) is therefore a brave venture – to get a politically diverse group of people to agree how poverty should be measured in the UK, led by one of Iain Duncan Smith’s former special advisers, but well-represented by a host of the-great-and-the-good from the Labour years. Amazingly this seems to have succeeded, with this week’s SMC report being been well-publicised and well-regarded (see the IFS response in The Times, or the BBC or the Guardian, and a more lukewarm Telegraph piece), but in this post I want to put some scrutiny on a central claim of the new measure: that it better captures poverty among disabled people.

Why we need to consider the extra costs of disability

There is a clear problem with the current main measures of poverty (known as ‘Households Below Average Income’, or HBAI): they look only at how much money people get. This assumes that everyone with the same amount of money has the same ability to buy the essentials of life, but it completely ignores the fact that some people – including many disabled people – have higher costs of living. (There’s a huge amount of research showing this empirically in different ways: for a list of references see my previous Inequalities post and the link of publications at the bottom).

One of the main claimed benefits of the SMC poverty measure is that it tries to tackle this by accounting for ‘inescapable costs’, such as ‘the impact that disability has on people’s needs’ (in their own words). It does this in a simple way: (i) Some people are given benefits (PIP, DLA, or AA) to help them meet the extra costs of disability. (ii) The value of these benefits that disabled people receive are treated as an estimate of the costs that they face. In other words, if you receive £80/week of PIP to meet the extra costs you need for daily life and getting around, then you are no better off than someone who doesn’t have these extra needs and doesn’t receive PIP.

They also do a host of other tweaks to measuring poverty, which overwhelmingly seem very sensible (These are summarised on p132 of the report). This includes taking people’s assets into account (if you’ve got savings, you can use these to buy essentials); doing a better job of accounting for childcare spending and mortgage payments as an inescapable cost; and some further tweaks around which groups of people are assumed to share income with one another, assuming that people in overcrowded housing need bigger houses to escape poverty, and including those living on the streets.

The impact on poverty statistics in the UK

The headline is that families that include a disabled person are much more likely to be in poverty than other families – the report summarises this as follows (the figures for disabled people themselves are available from their website’s graphing tool):

The report tells us that nearly half of people in poverty are in a household that contains a disabled person (48% in their measure vs. 44% in HBAI; see p135). They don’t actually compare the poverty rates, but this is easy enough to pick up from the official HBAI release though (using the After Housing Costs HBAI measure):

Among households with a disabled person, 26% are in poverty in HBAI, vs. 28% in the new SMC measure.

The gap in poverty rates between households with (vs. without) a disabled person is 6% (percentage points) in HBAI, but 11% in the new SMC measure.

In other words – when we try and account for the extra costs of disability, then the additional risk of poverty among households containing a disabled person (vs. those that don’t) is much higher.

However, there’s a problem. It assumes that disability extra cost benefits (DLA/PIP/AA) are a good measure of the extra costs of disability, when we know that they’re only meant as a contribution towards these costs, particularly for those with higher costs (see p17 of our NPI report & the review before it). In our NPI report we use a second crude measure of adjusting for the extra costs of disability, and find that it makes even more of a difference.

Moreover, if our poverty measure assumes that disability extra cost benefits = extra costs per se, then cutting these benefits has no impact on poverty by definition! That is: if people are receiving less money, then the poverty measure assumes their needs are also lower – which clearly isn’t the case. So to the extent that changes to PIP/DLA mean that fewer people claim benefits who might have done, this won’t be captured in the figures. (Note however that on my back-of-the-envelope calculation from official DLA/PIP/AA data, the proportion of the population who receives these benefits hasn’t changed much 2010-17 – let me know if you know of a more a systematic comparison than this).

As the SMC themselves conclude, we need more research on this to enable us to get a robust, policy-independent measure of poverty that captures the extra costs of disability. I completely agree with what they say here – we need both:

“Significant work to understand and measure the extra costs of disability that different disabled families face”; and

“Improvements to data captured on disability in both the FRS and Understanding Society to allow for clearer identification of disability types and severity so that extra costs can be understood within the survey data”

The SMC report is a useful step forward, but we need to keep walking…

]]>https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/does-the-new-poverty-measure-fully-capture-disability-poverty/feed/2bbgeigerIs truth-seeking inherently conservative?https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/is-truth-seeking-inherently-conservative/
https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/is-truth-seeking-inherently-conservative/#respondThu, 16 Aug 2018 18:05:48 +0000http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/?p=4386Continue reading →]]>Howard Becker’s 1967 ‘Whose Side Are We On?’ is one of the most famous papers in Sociology – a staple reading for generations of undergraduates, and still the subject of argument between academic sociologists about what Becker actually meant. Yet I have just discovered (thanks to Alistair Leitch at Oxford) a later 1973 paper by Becker that I think should be much more famous, for it considers the broader relationship between radical social science and radical politics, and poses more difficult questions for engaged social scientists in twenty-first century Britain. I can’t recommend reading the full paper highly enough, but in this post I want to dwell on one question it raises: is seeking the truth about the social world an inherently conservative enterprise?

Wishful thinking and radical social science

It is often argued by radical social scientists that any pretence at ‘value-neutrality’ or ‘value-freedom’ is false, because it inevitably asks the (value-laden) questions and uses the (value-laden) categories of those in power (indeed, this is part of the argument of WSAWO). But in 1973, Becker co-authored a paper with Irving Horowitz called ‘Radical Politics and Sociological Research’, and it is this paper which I think goes much deeper. In my reading, they highlight two key tensions between radical social science and radical politics.

The first is that radical politics has its own power structures, and these may be better-served by falsehood than by truth:

“…many forms of radical politics are themselves bound to canons of secrecy, perhaps more benign than conservative politics but ultimately no less destructive of the search for truth in society. Every status quo – societal, organizational, or factional – thrives on myth and mystification. Every group in power – in a nation, a government, an economy, a political party, or a revolutionary cadre – tells its story as it would like to have it believed, in the way it thinks will promote its interests and serve its constituencies. Every group in power profits from ambiguity and mystification, which hide the facts of power from those over whom power is exerted and thus make it easier to maintain hegemony and legitimacy”

In the face of such pressures, Becker & Horowitz are scathing about sociology that colludes in such ‘wishful thinking’ – indeed, they say that their paper is an attempt “to dissuade those who think political sloganeering can substitute for knowledge based on adequate evidence and careful analysis”.

But this is partly because radical politics fundamentally needs good social science for its success; “if an analysis is factually incorrect, then political predictions will not come to pass and strategies will be discredited”. (They variously describe a radical politics driven by wishful thinking as ‘no more than insurrectionary art’ and ‘fanaticism’). They therefore conclude that radical social science can support radical politics, without resorting to wishful thinking: “sociological radicalism can help us measure the distance between where people are and where they want to go – between the society and the utopia.”

Scientific conservatism and radical social science

Yet this is the lesser of the two challenges that they pose – for to my mind at least, it seems self-evident that even radical social science should avoid wishful thinking. The harder question to answer is whether radical social scientists must be ‘conservative’ in “in the sense of being unwilling to draw conclusions on the basis of insufficient evidence”, and by “indicating the high cost of some desired act”. And this is a trickier question.

We can describe the challenge as follows. Almost by definition, any radical political action will have uncertain chances of success, and be unable to rule out damaging side-effects. Emphasising these in itself serves the status quo, by demotivating the potential supporters of radical action and emboldening their opponents. And radical activists know this, so they will serve to play up the chances of success, and play down the chances of inadvertent damage.

Becker & Horowitz are ambiguous about this. Sometimes they suggest that this causes an inherent tension between radical politics and radical social science. But as we have seen, they also emphasise that by knowing the harms as well as benefits of a radical acts, this helps radical politics in the long run. They also suggest that radical sociology should jettison conservative assumptions that are unsupported by evidence (even if the alternative is similarly unsupported by evidence).

Despite the amibiguities in this excellent article, I found it helpfully clarified my thinking about my own role. If you dwell on the risks and uncertainties of radical change, then put bluntly, you are being conservative – indeed, I’ve spoken to Tory MPs who will gladly say that they will like the world to be much fairer, but they just think that the risks of social change are too great, so we should stick with the status quo. But if you deny the risks and uncertainties of radical change, then you have left the world of social science and have joined the ranks of the activists. The challenge we face is to sit between these extremes: to be critical rather than a zealous true believer, but to be critical in the service of radical change rather than the status quo.

]]>https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/is-truth-seeking-inherently-conservative/feed/0bbgeigerFurther increases in public support for benefit claimantshttps://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/further-increases-in-public-support-for-benefit-claimants/
https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/further-increases-in-public-support-for-benefit-claimants/#commentsTue, 31 Jul 2018 10:00:58 +0000http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/?p=4379Continue reading →]]>We’ve reached high summer, and this means intense heat, test cricket – and the latest installment of the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, our bible for showing how our attitudes have been changing. As ever, I like to review trends in attitudes towards benefit claimants on the blog (see 2017, 2015, 2014 and 2013) – and the headline news from this year’s chapter on social security attitudes is that public attitudes are increasingly positive.

Support for particular groups

What’s particularly interesting this year is that we can look at changing attitudes to social security spending on particular groups – something that we only see every couple of years. The question that BSA asks is:

Some people think that there should be more government spending on social security, while other people disagree. For each of the groups I read out please say whether you would like to see more or less government spending on them than now. Bear in mind that if you want more spending, this would probably mean that you would have to pay more taxes. If you want less spending, this would probably mean paying less taxes.

[The groups are: unemployed people | disabled people who cannot work | parents who work on very low incomes | single parents | retired people | people who care for those who are sick and disabled]

The big picture results is that support for spending on benefit claimants has gone up from 2015 to 2017, and this increase is particularly strong for disabled people and parents. You can see this in the red and purple lines in the chart below: support for more spending on benefits for disabled people has risen from 61% in 2015 to 63% in 2017 (and this continues a rise from 53% in 2011). There has been a similar rise in support for more spending on single parents from 36% to 42% (continuing a rise from 29% in 2011), and not shown in the chart below, on parents who work on very low incomes (from 58-61-66% 2011-15-17).

% who say that we should spend more on social security for…

There has also been a small rise in support (not shown in the graph) for more spending on the group who have been consistently the most strongly supported since this question was asked in 1999: ‘people who care for those who are sick and disabled’ (rising 73-75-78% over 2013-15-17). And at the other end of the spectrum, there has been a rise in support for spending on the least-supported group, unemployed people (rising 15-17-20% over 2013-15-17).

Strikingly in contrast though, support for more spending for social security on retired people has gone down slightly (from 49 to 47% 2015-17, and a huge drop from 72% in 2008). Indeed, for most of the last 20 years, there has been slightly more support for additional spending on retired people than for disabled people – but there is now a clear majority in favour of the latter. Indeed, support for more spending on retired people is almost at the same level as support for more spending on single parents. I’ve previously written about the declining (if still strong) support for spending on retired people here.

Wider benefit attitudes

The other extract from the data in this year’s BSA report concerns two questions about the consequences of benefit generosity:

If welfare benefits weren’t so generous, people would learn to stand on their own two feet

Cutting welfare benefits would damage too many people’s lives

This again shows a shift in attitudes towards seeing more negative and fewer positive consequences of lower benefits, as shown in the chart below. As recently as 2015, 6% more people agreed that less generous benefits would help people stand on their own two foot, compared to those agreeing that cutting benefits would damage too many people’s lives (with the gap being 12% in 2011). By 2017, this had swung the other way, with 13% more people thinking that cutting benefits would damage too many people’s lives – a balance we last saw in 2003.

% agreeing that…

As ever, there’s loads of other interesting material in this BSA chapter and indeed in the wider BSA report, with a particular focus on cleavages between younger and older people – though these haven’t changed over time (at least not for social security attitudes), so I will leave you to read the full report to explore this…

What this means for social security politics

As I have written above before (e.g. here), we need to be a bit careful in interpreting these: people’s responses are relative to their perceptions of recent policy, so if they think that spending on disabled people as been cut, then they are more likely to say that spending should be raised (even if their underlying ideal level of spending is unchanged) – something that is often referred to as ‘thermostatic’ attitudes.

Nevertheless, this suggests that after a hardening of attitudes towards benefit claimants under New Labour (particularly among Labour voters), attitudes towards benefit claimants since 2011 have been becoming ever-more positive year-on-year. How this translates to policy itself – and whether this happens under the present government or a future one – is another question in itself…

]]>https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/further-increases-in-public-support-for-benefit-claimants/feed/1bbgeigerDoes diversity help students learn about inequality?https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/07/02/does-diversity-help-students-learn-about-inequality/
https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/07/02/does-diversity-help-students-learn-about-inequality/#respondMon, 02 Jul 2018 11:00:36 +0000http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/?p=4367Continue reading →]]>Amidst all of the studies of public attitudes, there are relatively few studies that look at how we learn about inequality – yet if we know how people learn about inequality, then we have ideas about how people’s attitudes can be changed. So I was really interested to hear a presentation by LSE/Harvard’s Jonathan Mijs, looking at how the nature of universities influences how we learn about inequality. In this post I explain Mijs’s study (which I liked), and also his policy recommendations (which I didn’t)…

How do we investigate learning about inequality?

Mijs’ study has a simple idea at its heart: racial inequality is central to wider inequalities in the US (even more than the UK), and universities are a key place where different races1 can learn about each other and the scale of the (dis)advantage they face. Given that most US universities randomly allocate students to roommates, he looks at whether being randomly allocated a roommate of a different race makes us more aware of wider inequalities. (He uses an existing long-running survey called the College Freshman Survey and College Senior Survey, across 436 US universities).

The answer, in short, is ‘yes’. His slides haven’t been made available on the LSE website unfortunately, but you can see some of the results in a post at The Conversation, including this figure, which shows how people assigned a different-race roommate were noticeably more likely to explain inequality through structural factors:

How far students explained inequality through structural vs. meritocratic factors

I really like the use of randomized roommate assignment here – it’s a powerful way of getting at causal effects (in an area in which I don’t really trust most simple regressions). It’s worth adding that we’re assuming that roommates really are assigned at random, rather than people being matched to roommates that seem to be similar than them. However, there’s only a few things that university administrators would know about first-year students on-paper, and these are things that Mijs already controls for (and he does a sensitivity analysis restricted to first-year students), so this seems convincing to me. (Though I wasn’t as convinced about the analyses of student attitude change because of roommates after the first year for this reason).

While I liked the study, there are a couple of things that are worth bearing in mind here:

In Mijs’ talk, he actually presented a slightly different set of results from the same analysis (on students’ agreement with ‘Through hard work, everybody can succeed in America’ and ‘Racial discrimination is no longer a major problem in America’). He found that the effects were statistically significant but quite small (about 0.04-0.10 of a standard deviation).

Mijs also went on to show a lot complex interaction effects in his talk – that is, that the effects of having a roommate of a different race varies depending on your own race (and therefore your roommate’s race), and also the context of your institution. This was all quite reasonable – the impact of having a different-race roommate is greater at less diverse institutions, for example – but also slightly ad-hoc, which is why I don’t focus on them here.

What I really wanted, though, was to push this a bit further to look at exactly what is going on here. We can’t be completely sure that the effects are due to the race of the roommate – different-race roommates may also be different in other respects (e.g. socioeconomic class), and it might be this other aspect of difference that matters. Or plausibly the impact of a different-race roommate depends on what they’re like and how you get on with them – maybe having a super-smart different-race roommate leads you to think differently than having a different-race roommate that gets lower grades than you do. So I hope he continues to deepen this analysis even further in future!

So what should we do in response?

Where I parted ways from Mijs, though, was in his policy recommendations – and this comes to an issue that I’m going to return to on the blog, because Mijs followed a pattern than I often see among academic researchers. Mijs logic went something like this: I’ve found out that different-race roommates make us more aware of the inequality that exists (which is a good thing) ⇒ universities should introduce a policy of deliberately assigning people different-race roommates. But I think this is a flawed logic.

The point is that the effect of all policies depends on their meaning, and their meaning is changed by doing something deliberately as opposed to accidentally. Say that you currently had a different-race roommate who you didn’t like. As it stands, this is just the luck of the draw: some people get roommates they like, some don’t, but it’s nobody’s fault. But now imagine that the university had a policy of deliberately assigning different-race roommates. You may now blame your university for having a roommate you didn’t like, and moreover, this might create resentment that makes people less inequality-aware rather than more. I don’t know how far this would happen – but it’s clear that there is a gap between the effect-in-the-research and the likely-effect-of-the-policy.

More broadly, if we’re going to recommend policies, we need to think about them more deeply – about how they would be delivered in practice; about how this context differs from the context we studied; about what their unintended consequences might be; about the ethics as well as the effectiveness of what we’re proposing. Yet too often, social policy studies find that something matters, and then go straight to recommending that the thing is changed in a particular way, without really thinking this through or developing expertise on the policy scenario in question. This is arguably a collective issue rather than a matter of individual blame, and I have doubtlessly done the same myself; this is just what our journal papers, theses etc are expected to look like…

That said, I do think that Mijs’ theoretical approach has much value for policy. He argues that people mostly look at macro-level factors (culture/ideology, as I’ve discussed previously here) or micro-level factors (individual characteristics), but that this meso-level – our social context – is really important because it shapes the inequality that we see around us: if we’re surrounded by people like ourselves, then we will tend to underestimate the scope of wider inequalities. So aside from this paper on universities, he also has another interesting paper on school diversity (DOI), and an as-yet unpublished survey experiment getting people to think about diverse neighbourhoods, with hopefully more to come in future years.

Despite our disagreements, it’s an interesting line of work, and interesting food for thought.

Notes

1 I use the term ‘race’ following Mijs, but obviously I mean this in the sense of a culturally-constructed group, rather than something with an essential biological meaning.

]]>https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/07/02/does-diversity-help-students-learn-about-inequality/feed/0bbgeigerA temporary diversion: inequality and world footballhttps://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/a-temporary-diversion-inequality-and-world-football/
https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/a-temporary-diversion-inequality-and-world-football/#respondThu, 14 Jun 2018 14:20:11 +0000http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/?p=4365Continue reading →]]>A temporary interruption – I have a large list of half-written Inequalities articles, and normal service will be resumed next week. In the meantime, and in tribute to the start of the World Cup, I just saw this 2015 piece by the ever-intriguing Branko Milanovic, which ends with the following quote that I thought would be interesting (and provocative) to Inequalities readers:

“Well-meaning people often think that on our menu is both a more inclusive and less corrupt society. But unfortunately, our choices in real life are more likely to be either a more inclusive and less unequal society with greater corruption, or an autocratic, elite-run society with less corruption simply because those in power are already rich and powerful enough.”

]]>https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/a-temporary-diversion-inequality-and-world-football/feed/0bbgeigerSanctioning disabled claimants: interrogating the evidencehttps://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/sanctioning-disabled-claimants-interrogating-the-evidence/
https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/sanctioning-disabled-claimants-interrogating-the-evidence/#commentsFri, 25 May 2018 09:30:21 +0000http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/?p=4356Continue reading →]]>This seems like a good time to take stock of the evidence on perhaps the biggest issue in the benefits system over the past few years: benefits sanctioning. The massive ESRC-funded ‘welfare conditionality’ project has this week published its final findings, prompting headlines that “Benefit sanctions found to be ineffective and damaging“ and “Benefit sanctions increasing poverty and pushing people into ‘survival crime,’ finds report”. The Parliamentary Select Committee is doing an inquiry, as is the Government’s former sanctioning reviewer Matt Oakley for one of the think-tanks. And I myself have written about in a paper last year and Demos report earlier this year.

But often missed in the hubbub are the subtleties of the evidence, a deeper effort to get to the bottom of what we know. Over a few blog posts, I want to interrogate some of the existing evidence, to challenge some of the easy interpretations that get mobilised for political debate. And this week it’s the turn of the Government’s 2016 pilots of conditionality for ESA claimants, which were quietly published last August – and unlike this week’s headlines, the pilots seemed to show that conditionality was effective.

A pilot of conditionality via ‘More Intensive Support’

The policy in question is something called ‘More Intensive Support’ (MIS). This was a mandatory series of extra Jobcentre interviews for a particular set of disability benefit claimants (ESA WRAG claimants returning from the Work Programme), which was claimed to test the effects of conditionality (more of which later). And unusually the DWP evaluated the impacts of MIS using a randomised control trial – one of very few such studies anywhere in the world that has been done on the effects of conditionality on sick/disabled claimants.

The quantitative evaluation of the RCT was published by Government in August 2017 within a ‘synthesis report’ (this covers both MIS and two slightly different sorts of pilots that I won’t talk about; there are also two more detail reports on aspects of the qualitative evaluations. There’s also an excellent summary of the reports from a mental health angle by Ayaz Manji at Mind).

On the surface, we seem to have an intervention based on conditionality for disabled people, evaluated using the strongest possible design. And the headline result was that MIS increased employment rates over the following year, as the chart below shows:

Not so fast: a considered take on the impact of MIS

However, the results of MIS are actually more nuanced for a bundle of different reasons:

We can’t be very sure of whether MIS really did have a positive effect on employment or not – there is a wide confidence interval around the effects, to the extent that we would usually say we’re not confident of the results (or in cruder terms I don’t like: that it’s often not statistically significant at conventional levels).

The effect isn’t very big – it amounts to an extra 1% of those affected by the intervention getting into work by the end of a year. The overwhelming majority (>95%) of these claimants were not working at the end of a year, which as the qualitative research makes clear, is because they had really severe barriers to work.

MIS seemed to do as well (or better) at pushing people off benefits per se, than it did of getting them into work. You can see this in a couple of ways; that it reduced the numbers of people on benefit from about wk13 but only consistently increased the numbers in work from about wk30, and that it reduced the number of claimants by about 2%, roughly double the effect on employment.

MIS seemed to be bad news for people with mental health problems, as far as we can tell (although the sample size is getting small at this point). The employment effect on those without mental health problems was +6.7% (with a 95% confidence interval of -0.7 to +14.0), but the effect on those WITH a mental problem problem was -1.1% (-5.5 to +3.3%). However, the effect on benefit claims seemed to be the same, suggesting that MIS was pushing people with mental health problems off benefits without getting them into work. This isn’t definitive – as you can see, the confidence intervals are wide – but this is hardly a ringing endorsement of MIS for this group.

I should add that these figures are all very clear in the evaluation report that DWP produced. The summary of the results is also generally OK, but it does gloss over the difference between the employment effect and the benefits effect, which is potentially misleading.

What exactly does MIS show anyway?

There is however a deeper problem here, about exactly what MIS shows – and this is a problem that we can see in other UK & US evaluations of conditionality for disabled people (such as the UK Support for the Very Long-Term Unemployed Trailblazer; see my 2018 Demos report p72). The problem is that this is not actually a test of ‘sanctions’ at all – it is a test of giving people more support that they can be sanctioned if they don’t take up. Given that we know that giving people more support is usually a good thing , then it’s very hard to know what these types of studies actually show.

To make matters worse, the DWP research reports give us effectively zero information on how much sanctioning actually happened in MIS. Indeed, it appears that some Jobcentres tried to subvert the purpose of the trial. In principle MIS participants were meant to receive 270 mins of work coach time per year (rather than 88mins), but in practice they received 115mins (and 70mins for the control). In explaining this, the report notes:

“administrative data suggests that some sites did not appear to distinguish between the intervention and the control participants, providing similar amounts of support to each group. This quantitative finding is corroborated by some Work Coach accounts that they did not feel comfortable treating individuals differently. Rather, they based their support on the individual claimant’s needs.”

Conversely, the qualitative research with claimants (p76) showed that claimants were often given the impression that voluntary interventions were mandatory anyway, something that I have heard anecdotal reports of elsewhere. That is: an intervention labelled as ‘nominal extra support with mandation’ can lead to little of either; whereas an intervention labelled as ‘voluntary’ can be felt to be mandatory.

In conclusion, on paper this pilot should have been a real contribution to the evidence base, helping us understand whether or not conditionality works for one group of sick/disabled benefit claimants. In practice, the impact assessments end up telling us surprisingly little (much as the accompanying qualitative reports are very revealing). In future weeks I will consider how much other forms of research on conditionality can tell us, and what our research priorities should be going forward.

]]>https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/sanctioning-disabled-claimants-interrogating-the-evidence/feed/3bbgeigerPeople in MIS were more likely to be in employment than those in the control groupCan poverty rise while inequality is flat?https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/can-poverty-rise-while-inequality-is-flat/
https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/can-poverty-rise-while-inequality-is-flat/#respondThu, 26 Apr 2018 08:35:12 +0000http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/?p=4347Continue reading →]]>I recently saw a great post about how there’s been a big increase in inequality within the bottom half of the income distribution (between the 3rd and 1st (bottom) deciles) from 1996-2008, which then fell but rose again 2011-2016.

The piece is on stumblingandmumbling (the great economics blog by Chris Dillow) , and I thought Inequalities readers might be interested – if so, you can read his full piece here. (I’ll occasionally link to interesting other blog posts, in between my own biweekly blog posts).

]]>https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/can-poverty-rise-while-inequality-is-flat/feed/0bbgeigerMost people are ‘benefit claimants’ sometimes…https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/most-people-are-benefit-claimants-sometimes/
https://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/most-people-are-benefit-claimants-sometimes/#commentsThu, 19 Apr 2018 15:45:07 +0000http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/?p=4349Continue reading →]]>One of the biggest misconceptions about the benefits system is that we split neatly and permanently into two groups: ‘benefit claimants’ and ‘everyone else’. As soon as you take a long view, though, you realise how wrong this is: many people move in-and-out of struggles at different times in their lives, and one of the key roles of the welfare state is to help us smooth out the bad times. John Hills calls this ‘the welfare myth of them and us’ (the sub-title of his recent book), and has dedicated many years to challenging it.

Now in a great new piece of research, the Institute of Fiscal Studies has put together the data to show us the long view – and this tells us that the majority of people are ‘benefit claimants’ at some point in their lives (even ignoring pensions and child benefits…).

What we already knew

My version of this story comes from my time at LSE in the late 2000s, where I was taught (and later had my PhD supervised) by John Hills. I think John had long-known that the welfare state uses money from people during their good years, to give it back to them in their bad years – but getting the data to show this was an almighty challenge, because it requires following people over long periods of time, and trying to look at today’s welfare state even though people live through a constantly changing one.

In a seminal piece of work in the 1990s (which I’ve previously mentioned on the blog), Jane Falkingham and John Hills took 4000 representative people and simulated the lifetime effect of the 1991 welfare state. As summarised in John’s 2004 book Inequality and the State (#8.4), “most benefits are self-financed over people’s lifetimes rather than being paid for by others… nearly three-quarters of what the welfare state was doing in the late 1980s and early 1990s was like a ‘savings bank’, and only a quarter was ‘Robin
Hood’ redistribution between different people”. John’s recent book (p67) presents the figures for the 1991 welfare state updated to 2010 prices:

Benefits recipiency over the long run

This is where the IFS study by Barra Roantree and Jonathan Shaw comes in (beind a paywall in a journal (DOI), but see also their free 2014 report). They use a 20-year survey of a representative sample of the British population (BHPS 1991-2008), and start by showing that about 20% claimed one means-tested benefit in each wave (see table below). But if you look across the whole 18-year period, you can see that 54% of Britons – over half – claimed a means-tested benefit at some point.

(As a quick aside, Table 2.3 of their 2014 report came to a total figure of just under half (47.8%). As far as I can tell, this is because their earlier figure for ‘tax credits’ ignored ‘family credits’ – the precursor to tax credits – before 1999).

What is more, they say – very plausibly – that this is likely to be an underestimate. This is partly because the survey only asks people about their claims once per year, so some people may start and stop a claim without BHPS knowing. But it’s also because we know that survey respondents under-report their benefit claims – indeed, one IFS study shows that BHPS sometimes captures less than half the families that claim income support, council tax benefit or housing benefit.

And there’s more in the IFS study…

This is perhaps the most headline-grabbing message that comes out of the research – but they go on to build on the insights of the Falkingham-Hills research, which can be cut one of three ways:

The tax and benefits system is more redistributive between people in a single year than it is in the long-run (because much of it is redistributing between good and bad times within people’s own lives);

Income inequality is lower when you average people’s income over several years than if you look at single year, but the difference made by the welfare state is lower too;

In total across 18 years, looking only at the tax and benefits system (and not the rest of the welfare state), about 12% of all redistribution is within the same person rather than between different people. As they say, 18 years is some way short of a full lifetime – they cite Falkingham and Harding (1996)’s book and Bovenberg et al. (2008) in Denmark showing that this rises to about 60-75% when looking over the whole lifetime.

This is one of those times that a single number conceals a wealth of careful analysis (and indeed, of careful and expensive data collection in BHPS) – it’s great to see the IFS doing this kind of thing, building on the earlier work of Hills, Falkingham and many others.

The sanctioning of disabled benefit claimants is a reality in Britain: over a million benefit sanctions have been applied to disabled people since 2010.

We therefore cannot avoid asking: can these be justified? One possible justification is that sanctions increase employment, and another is that they are necessary for ensuring the benefits system is fair. Yet both arguments are contentious, and little evidence on disabled people has made it into the fierce public debates about sanctioning. In a new Demos report, I look closely at the evidence – using new analyses of official data, new international comparisons, a new survey, and the wider academic evidence – and find both justifications wanting.

The effects of sanctioning

Whatever the evidence on the effects of sanctions more generally (and I review this in the report), we would expect things to be different for disabled people. I may know that I have depression, or cancer – but neither my ‘work coach’ in the Jobcentre nor I myself can be sure how I would cope in the workplace. Ideally I would experiment with things I don’t know that I could do but won’t cause me any harm, safe in the knowledge that I will still have enough money to live if it doesn’t work out. Sanctioning, however, drives people to hunker down rather than to experiment. Because of this, the overwhelming majority of experts that I spoke to thought that sanctioning would be counterproductive.

The academic evidence bears out the expert view. Six studies worldwide have looked at the impact on disabled people of either mandatory rehabilitation meetings with the threat of sanctions, or at sanctions themselves. The least convincing studies show mixed (positive or null) results, but the three most convincing studies – the only ones based on randomly allocating people to get the threat or reality of sanctions – all show negative effects. As I summarised this in a paper last year, while the evidence isn’t certain, “the limited but robust existing evidence focusing on disabled people suggests that sanctioning may have zero or even negative impacts on work-related outcomes.” And we should also note the anecdotal but widespread evidence that sanctions can lead to poverty and deteriorating health.

The fairness of sanctioning

The other argument for benefit sanctioning is that it is integral to a fair benefits system. When I asked a representative sample of the British public about this, I did find that a majority supported the imposition of sanctions for disabled people – but they did not support the way this is done at present. A majority thought disabled people’s benefit should be cut if they refuse suitable training or rehabilitation. However, unlike current government policy, they were less supportive of sanctioning for sometimes turning up late for meetings. And even those who do support sanctions prefer much weaker sanctions than those the government presently uses. Overall, only 6-11% thought that a disabled person should lose most or all of their benefits if they sometimes turned up late for meetings.

What is more, when I spoke to people in more depth, these opinions about the principle of sanctioning quickly turned into discussions about real-world practice: even if we think that the system should include sanctions, how do we know what disabled people are capable of doing, to ensure that they are not sanctioned for things that are impossible for them to do? Many experts had serious concerns about the fairness of sanctions to date, echoing a government-commissioned review of sanctions, parliamentary select committees, a major qualitative academic study, and innumerable disability charities & campaigners. In new research, I show that disabled people on JSA were 26-53% more likely to be sanctioned than non-disabled JSA claimants (which the Observer covered here), which provides some statistical support to the widespread view that this process was unfair.

The future of sanctioning

Put simply, it is difficult to justify the sanctioning system for disabled benefit claimants as it currently stands – even for those who agree with sanctioning does have a place in the benefits system, it seems to be neither effective nor fair for disabled people. In the report, I explain a number of steps in more detail that could make the current system fairer and more effective. But foremost amongst these is a simple principle: to get a fairer, more effective system – which also costs less money to run – the government should reduce the extent of benefit conditionality disabled people face per se.